THE prize for Brexit Bellylaugh of the Week is getting more competitive with every day that brings us closer to March 29. After giving the matter some thought, Squinter has been unable to separate two candidates, and so the prize is jointly awarded. First co-winner is Andrea Leadsom, Tory Leader of the House, for her reaction to Donald Tusk’s statement that there’s “a special place in hell” for those who promoted Brexit “without a sketch of a plan”.
Andrea’s response was rather more temperate than that of Sammy Wilson, who opined that Mr Tusk was a “devilish, trident wielding, euro maniac”. She remarked, with what would appear at first blush to be commendable restraint: “The man has no manners.”
But on hearing Andrea’s mention of the word “manners”, a little bell went off somewhere deep in Squinter’s hippocampus and after a short period of beard-scratching and pencils-sucking, it came to Squinter why the Honourable Member is on rather thin ice when it comes to matters of polite conduct.
Come back in time with Squinter to the summer of 2016, just two weeks before Britain voted to leave the EU. Andrea was locked in a battle with Theresa May for leadership of the Conservative Party. In an interview with The Times, when asked why the party should opt for her, she replied that her rival “possibly has nieces, nephews, lots of people. But I have children who are going to have children who will directly be part of what happens next.”
So there we have it. Andrea pitched for the top job by saying having children gives her more of a stake in the country. At which point, we should remind ourselves that Theresa May has spoken honestly and movingly about the fact that she and her husband Philip were unable to have children.
Manners? Yih pays yer money…
Joint winner is British Transport Secretary Chris Grayling who announced on Friday that he was cancelling the £14 million contract he had awarded to Seaborne Freight just before Christmas to provide a ferry service from Ramsgate to Ostend to ease the pressure on the port of Dover should the UK crash out with no deal.
Mr Grayling’s tenure has been one of the great comedy shows of British politics and it’s widely believed that he remains in office only to direct fire away from more senior colleagues. Not that he could have seen this mess developing. After all, Seaborne Freight was a highly respected company with a long history of professional and responsible conduct in the business of ferries and freight, right? Well, since the company only hit the news in December you probably don’t need Squinter to remind you that Seaborne Freight:
• Was a completely new company
• Didn’t own a ship
• Cut and pasted its website terms and conditions from a pizza delivery firm (‘Thoroughly check the supplied goods before agreeing to pay for any meal/order.”) and an online boutique
The high-flying cabinet minister sent out to back Grayling when the contract was scrubbed was Communities Secretary James Brokenshire. You know, the bloke was Secretary of State here for a while and nobody noticed.
Chris’ll be gone by the end of the week, then.

Fail to prepare...

LET’S be honest, Jim Wells isn’t flavour of the month within the DUP. The South Down MLA had the party whip withdrawn last spring after he fell out with the top brass over his claim that they had reneged on a promise to reinstate him as Health Minister after he stepped down in 2015 over an election hustings row.
Jimbo claimed then party leader party leader Peter Robinson promised to reinstate him when and if the furious furore blew over (which it did). He further alleged that when Arlene Foster took over as leader she ignored two written requests from him to honour Peter’s pledge. These days Jimbo’s something of a voice in the wilderness, technically still a DUP MLA but shorn of any authority to speak for the party. Which makes him of considerable interest to journalists, since the resentment he clearly still feels makes him a little bit more willing to open up about things than other DUP reps.
Jim’s been at it again this week and, given the state we’re in at the moment, you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that it’s Brexit-related. Jim revealed that at the extraordinary meeting at which the party decided to back Leave in the months leading up to the EU referendum in 2016, there was zero discussion of what a Leave vote would mean for the local economy. This would be an awkward revelation for most parties, but after the tsunami of controversies that the DUP has been through in the past couple of years, it seems to have reached the point that its brand is so polluted the tin can’t get any more dented, the label any dirtier. But that’s not the disaster that it would certainly be for any other party because the DUP’s substantial vote clearly consists of people who don’t care what they get up to as long as they’re not Sinn Féin.
Lack of planning – it’ll do for ye every time. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail, that’s the old saying and nowhere does it ring more true than in the crazy world of Brexit. Let’s take a look at a few of the most notorious failures of a lack of foresight and see if we can work out where the DUP Brexit calamity fits in…
Betamax
’Member when video cassettes were the most exciting innovation in the history of technology? You don’t? Well, you must be under 40, so let’s see if we can explain. Two Japanese giants of the global electronics industry were caught up in the race to win control of the massive new market. JVC produced the eventually successful VHS format, while Sony produced the toploading Betamax system. Although the Betamax system was of a superior picture quality, it was considerably more expensive and had a shorter recording time. At a meeting in 1974, Sony were advised by Matsushita engineers to switch to the VHS format, but declined. It wa a historic mistake, dealing the company a crippling financial blow from which it would take years to recover.
Ford Edsel
Ford were inordinately pleased with the Edsel, a new model released in the United States in 1957, the year after the Ford family relinquished control of the company. The Edsel (named after Edsel Ford, the son of company founder Henry) was designed to give Ford the upper-hand in the highly competitive premium/intermediate market (think somewhere between a Vauxhall Insignia and a Jaguar). The company missed the design boat, though, as the car harked back to an earlier age at a time when families were increasingly turning to compact vehicles. The Edsel was discontinued two years later, with sales significantly less than half the break-even sales figure. Executives took their eye off the ball and didn’t realise the Edsel was flopping until over $4.1bn (in today’s money) had been spent on design, manufacture and new dealerships. To this day, new models that fail are still referred to in the US automobile market as ‘Edsels’.
New Coke
In the mid-80s, as other soft drinks were increasingly threatening the dominance of Coca-Cola, the company decided it was going to ditch the original Coke formula and go with an improved ‘New Coke’. The 1985 launch was a disaster and sales were badly hit, particularly in the southern states where Coca-Cola was considered an integral part of American culture. Tens of thousands of complaints flooded into company HQ weekly. The problem was not so much with the taste – the company had disastrously underestimated the hold that the Coca-Cola brand had on the American psyche. Smelling blood, rivals Pepsi began a new ad campaign with the strapline ‘Now I Know Why Coke Did It’ (their sales rose by 14 per cent and the company gave every employee a day off to celebrate). Fans started booing ads for New Coke at large sports events. Just 78 days after New Coke was launched, the company announced that it was bringing back the old formula.
Has to be a Brexit message in there somewhere, no?